Bombay gatekeeping and the scene’s Todi Mills complex

From Boiler Room to Basscamp Festival 2024

Nine years ago, September’s Ganpati celebrations in Bombay were a watershed moment for dance music in India with Nucleya’s album launch for Bass Rani (2015). Nucleya demonstrated the scale of demand for homegrown EDM which maintains its independence from Bollywood. Although the Nucleya moment has long passed, EDM and the broader dance music circuit in India has had time to expand its roots in the popular imagination. The scene has stratified into tiers of ‘mainstream’ dance music fan culture whose tastes range from Bolly-tech to ‘EDM’ (a loaded, specific genre rather than a broad label for electronic dance music) that have been much scorned by an equally dubiously named ‘underground’. As elsewhere, the self-declared ‘underground’ fashions itself as cooler-than, signalling through its musical taste, fashion and socially-exclusive access. This distinction has always been at the core of rave culture, ratified in cultural studies nearly thirty years ago through Sara Thornton’s seminal work Club Cultures (1995)— 

“Discursive distance from [the mainstream masses] is a measure of a clubber’s cultural worth. Youthful clubber and raver ideologies are almost as anti-mass culture as the discourses of the artworld.” (1995: 8)

In India, the underground is a performance played out by a haute couture elite, a mythical space that oldheads and hipsters seek out to distinguish themselves from the base cultural masses. Now, with the broader dance music circuit in India burgeoning along with the global wave of neo-rave culture, the borders separating the underground from the mainstream are becoming porous and subsequently increasingly militarised. The gatekeepers are intensifying their bullying of suspected infiltrators and are disinvesting from once-niche spaces overrun by mass culture. This condescension aimed at the new generation of dance music fans is not just embarrassingly hypocritical but reveals an insecurity at the heart of elite music cultures in India.

Across the world, lockdown was the perfect incubator for neo-rave culture. Twitch streams and TikTok trends took the pent-up hedonism of a youth watching its best years pass by and aestheticised it into bum bags, retro sunglasses and a taste for hardstyle techno. Now that the ‘mainstream’ has come out to clubs and festivals again, it is already fluent in the styles that once distinguished the underground. This is a new generation of unproven connoisseurs who make up for their lack of years on the dancefloor (which are ravenously being reclaimed) with an unprecedented depth of how-to-rave knowledge. This same cohort, who once would have thronged for Nucleya and EDM, is today more avant-garde than ever before. Regardless of ancestry — from the college festivals of Nucleya to Ganpati mandals and from resto-bars to ticketed techno shows — those in attendance at Boiler Room Mumbai 2024 had flirted with dance music long before they knew what Boiler Room was. 

Authentic memories of dance music combined with independent knowledge of rave culture means that the crowd at the Nesco warehouse for Boiler Room Mumbai was self-secure and uninhibited in expressing its disappointment and boredom.  Unlike their counterparts in Bangalore, where the pressures of seeing and being seen at Boiler Room forced consistently over-the-top responses, the audience in Mumbai was at ease in its performance and remained unconvinced through the night. This Boiler Room audience expressed its boredom in its nonchalance on the dancefloor, the occasional Taambdi Chaamdi chant and in many cases, just leaving early. Each of these indicates a comfort with themselves — their sedated movement showed that there was no pressure to feign a vibe or dance a certain way, the Taambdi Chaamdi chants a half-ironic attempt to resuscitate the night and entertain themselves, and leaving early a prudent ‘cut-your-losses’ decision. Each rejection of the music at Boiler Room was an indication of a hyper-aware audience, increasingly intentional with their purchasing power and unbothered by narratives of how ‘raves should be’. 

Of course, the bypassing of the gatekeepers raised alarm bells. The authors of The Swaddle’s critique of Boiler Room 2024 took the boredom of the audience as a photo-op or a sign that Boiler Room had lost its ‘underground’ ethos in favour of becoming mainstream. For these “longtime scene kids” accustomed to Bonobo and antiSocial, this was unlike any party they had been to— 

“The kids and the punters showed up in their cyberpunk shades, cut-off tees, and coloured hair […] influencers started walking in around 7pm […] There were a lot of “Brooooo”s all around […] unhinged, like it was a college fest.”

The other-ing of the audience who are reduced to pejoratives indicates an insecurity in the authors’  position as vanguards of ‘the scene’. Construed as a sign of an uneducated mass encroaching on hallowed turf, the authors are quick to delink themselves from the ‘demo’ (shorthand for demographic in marketing-speak, common parlance for the Swaddle and friends). The end result is Boiler Room’s obituary— death by a mainstream that is simultaneously infantilised, groomed and profited off of.  Earlier this month, Resident Advisor feebly distanced themselves from the now ‘mainstream’ Fred Again in an attempt to remind their audience of their own ‘underground’ ethos. The Swaddle reproduces this same tactic. In both cases, they are flogging dead horses: aware that there is no (sub)cultural capital left to extract, they are more than happy to denigrate what was once cool and wait for the next muse to prop up. So the cycle continues. The Swaddle thus join a host of others trying to demarcate themselves or ‘educate’ the new crowd in the ‘proper’ (read: Western-led) etiquettes of the rave. The ‘proper’ raver is usually distinguished by avoiding certain telltale behaviours of mass culture; this discourse of (borderline internally racist) red flagging often points out sexual harassment as equally heinous as having conversations on the dancefloor or participating in the characteristically Indian crowd’s ouu-ouu’s. 

Democratisation of access has created immense pressure on the gatekeepers, who in fear of being overwhelmed by the cultural nouveau-riche, quickly jettison the properties that have been infiltrated. In turn, they defend the location of the authentic scene— but who, and where, is underground? As they may have you believe, the ‘underground’ is at antiSocial. The ‘underground’ here is a gentrified facade literally built on top of decades of repressed urban trauma in the chawls and factories of the textile industry. But the ‘underground’ is not brick and mortar, it is a performance that uses once-subcultural signifiers to demonstrate its authenticity. 

Krunk’s 12th edition of Basscamp Festival at antiSocial showed symptoms of the scene’s chronic Todi Mills complex—- not exclusive enough to be underground, not countercultural enough to be authentic. Being cool(er than the mainstream) means displaying niche and ‘authentic’ subcultural signifiers; this authenticity derives from the subversive or political discourses of the subcultures from which the music, fashions, and styles are appropriated. For instance —  Swadesi’s track Warli Revolt (2019) was once an incendiary rallying cry made with tribal activists in Aarey protesting the clearing of forest land for the Mumbai Metro construction (remember that your-favourite-celebrity-DJ played at the Ambanis’ wedding, the dynasty who still own majority stake in the Mumbai Metro One). Five years hence, Swadesi’s revolution was remixed into the opener for Kiss Nuka's set at Basscamp and took its place alongside other samples— from Reggae Rajahs to Kurupt FM— played over the two nights at antiSocial. Exemplified by Swadesi’s gully discourse, many subcultures are often exactly those that resisted the onslaught of urban modernity and the established cultural orders that absorb them. Thus while the so-called ‘underground’ necessarily isolates itself from the overground masses by performing as subculture, its sanitised appropriation of ‘real’ counterculture renders itself impotent. 

But if not countercultural, the elite underground is still vaguely subcultural. Like any scene, it has in its engine room a collaborative network of creatives and producers. This is that hallowed ‘community’ of the scene — graphic designers, musicians, visual artists, fashion designers, even promoters— which shows up early and regularly. Social access here is earned through commitment and actual creative work. At Basscamp on its second night in Bombay, the network began its IRL interfacing at the art exhibition by Optikal Asylum (formerly of Kranti Art Theory) which has been a platform connecting young artists with music subcultures. The night picked up with a treat of a live set by Drum ani Bass, an exceptionally musically astute homegrown act. Eventually, chin-stroking gave way to occasional footwork as the locals got on the decks, but soon enough the crowd had grown beyond its core creative community. Still, antiSocial never really reached capacity. Basscamp had snuck under the mainstream’s radar, and was a comfort zone (not a ‘safe space’) for the ‘longtime scene kids’ to signal in peace. The smoking room was the site for the usual the-scene-is-dead talk mourning the loss of some fabled authenticity, but also for communal self-congratulation: even if the scene sometimes feels cramped or nepotistic, at the very least there is comfort in seeing familiar faces around especially when the real threat of mainstream incursion is at the gates.

However, the imminent danger to the cultural elite is not from the masses above, but from other parallel undergrounds below. Other properties are already demonstrating that you don’t have to be desperately OG to program great nights for your own community. For early indicators, one only need glance at the new names populating the weekly updates from Instagram pages like Bombay underground. A case in point—  a week after Krunk’s Basscamp, Elvt.live took over Waves Club Mumbai (a typically ‘mainstream’ destination) to put up new local names on B2B sets supporting an India debut from Alpha Tracks on an exceptionally ‘underground’ no-cameras night for Waves Club’s standards. As an afterparty destination, Waves attracts a multilingual crowd extending their night from across the city— including Pubjabi-speakers from Delhi, Marathi-speakers on ecstacy, Sobo-speaking brats talking about buying drinks for the ‘eye candy’, and suburban kids who pregame on their scooty and are regular patrons of Waves but have heard that antiSocial has a ‘good sound system’. Most at Waves didn’t know who Alpha Tracks was; but no matter, they threw steps and hands to his set that would have brought the Nesco roof down had it been played there two weeks ago. By today, Krunk has undoubtedly earned its place at the vanguard of the underground through its years of service to the scene. Still, Nucleya’s prophecy of anyone-can-do-it is coming true, embodied by a new-faced generation. But despite democratisation, the traditional underground represented by Krunk still maintains its death grip on the few legitimate live music spaces like antiSocial. With national venue shortages, their monopoly is their most important asset, and will ensure their survival for as long as their relationship with Social's empire stands.

It is a precarious time now while the scene devours itself— when everyone dresses the same, listens to the same music, and have all apparently been to Berlin, who can tell apart poseur from authentic, infiltrator from OG, tourist from creative community? Popularised access to rave mythology and programming means that the ‘underground’ syndicate which once had monopoly over subcultural capital has been forced into a tactical retreat into its strongholds where it may mount a valiant if misguided last stand. It remains to be seen how the old underground defends itself, but perhaps there is hope in riding out the mainstream wave. In any case, it is unlikely that ‘rave culture’ will stay so immensely popular for so long. Perhaps we may see the pendulum swing back as the mainstream fragments into subcultures again?

References

Thornton, Sara (2013), Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital, Wiley.